Modern Web Revenue Models

By Daniel Hurley

This is the second in a series of posts reflecting on the Google ‘Panda’ Update’s impact on search marketing and how it has re-defined the industry.

There’s a great scene in the 1989 cult baseball favorite Major League. Upon arriving at the ballpark one day, the team discovers that the club’s owner, who has purposefully assembled an awful Cleveland Indians team in hopes of selling, has sold off all of the outfield wall space in billboard advertising. Unsurprisingly, she claims to be forced into the bondage of advertising revenue because the quality of the product on the field is so poor.

This experience plays itself out on the web. Just as in sports and late night cable television, the use of advertising as a heavy supplement to income generated from having great content typically indicates a substandard consumer experience between the foul poles and the browser margins.

When we consider Google’s Panda update and how it affected ad-heavy sites, it seems clear that Panda was the web’s version of baseball’s revenue sharing model, which forced, or at least incentivized, significant investment in the on-field product by owners. Google has not been ambiguous in acknowledging that advertising-heavy sites were among those hardest hit in early iterations of its Panda update that focused on content quality and user experiences.

But what I feel has not fully been explored, and what I’ll attempt to do here, is understand why advertising-heavy sites have been associated with poor user experiences and substandard content. Moreover, what are the new revenue models for website owners in a post-Panda web?

There’s a relationship between a website and its users that is not all unlike that between any team and its fans. The best teams typically have a winning tradition, consistently draw fans to their games, and connect with their fans on a level that breeds loyalty. The best websites will typically have some measure of historic credibility, are viewed as authoritative among similar websites; feature rich and engaging content, and connect with their user on a level that builds trust across a domain as a whole.

In the pre-Panda web, and perhaps even now, advertising seems to be the way in which bad websites patch the income disparities associated with lacking a loyal readership, featuring great content, and the inherent financial benefits associated with being a trusted web entity. Traffic is low, readership is low, return visitors are non-existent, so advertising revenue needs to supplement these areas. This is the problem Google seemed to address with Panda.

It’s important to remember that advertising in and of itself, is not an inherently negative experience across the web. In many cases, the commercialization and sponsorship of certain web properties is natural and necessary. There is of course, a tasteful and permissible level of advertising that the owners of the best websites should be allowed to capitalize upon. Sites with high quality content and great user engagement create commercial affiliations with other trusted brands and web entities.

There does however, exist a threshold in which the quantity or prominence of commercial advertising begins to cheapen the quality of a site’s content. Panda seemed to take the bull by the horns on this and make assessments about what a site’s topical center is, assume that effectively servicing users would be serving them information around that topic, and then penalize those sites in which advertising obstructed a user from accessing this information efficiently.

The Marxist Web

Very few of the best websites out there today were able to monetize immediately. Even better websites began with no designs on ever monetizing. Rather than structuring a moneymaking proposition around a website, these website owners focused on populating great content and engaging a community of followers. In many cases, they were able to offset hosting costs by relying on the goodwill of their readers for donations. The quality of the site’s content engendered a spirit of contribution, and the website owners were held to that level of quality accountability to their readers. These forum sites and niche-topic blogs were, at their core, a self-sustaining and Marxist web.

When the modern web became one for mass consumption, disconnect grew between websites and their users and the web infused with advertising became the commercial Internet we know today.

In a post-Panda world though, it would seem that the single-most important investment a web site owner could make today is to enhance the quality of their total content offering in such a way that it bridges the gap between their website and their community of content consumers.

Brands and Community

Connecting a group of people to a brand means a holistic and fluid web experience; from entrance point, through the point of sale, and continued engagement long after the conversion. Just like niche websites are able to connect users around shared interests, web brands are able to engender the trust of their users around their core area of commercial expertise well past the point of sale.

Communities connect to brands that aim not only to sell them blue widgets- they want to learn about history of blue widgets, connect with other blue widget enthusiasts, compare reviews of red vs. blue widgets, and read about technological advancements and charitable efforts taking place in the blue widget industry.

Fleet Feet Sports, a boutique running equipment company that specializes in fitting running shoes and other equipment to each individual runner’s stride, size, and instep pronation, is a good example of a web presence of this kind of brand. Because of the personalization required for each product sale, the company doesn’t sell their equipment online. Despite that, their website is a robust blend of social media, events/training information, message boards, and equipment highlights that connects their customer around the brand before and after the point of sale.

The branded website that is able to build this level of engagement then owns a measure of loyalty with its users that should make the site a self-sustaining monetary success model.

Conversion vs. Engagement Revenue Models: An SEO’s New Role

In a simpler web marketing industry, an SEO’s role in the conversion process meant simply doing all they could to rank a site competitively for the types of keywords that led to conversions. This was done effectively through link building for targeted pages with key phrases and terms, but the SEO’s connection to the user conversion process was largely peripheral and a deeper understanding of users was considered a luxury, if not an over-qualification.

Today it seems that the most effective SEO’s role has evolved from one that focuses solely on search engine positioning to one that fosters a level of engagement and trust in a website- which still contributes to search engine positioning, but does so by targeting positive user experiences and interaction with a website. Perhaps the most obvious of these efforts are effective social media campaigns (campaigns that, as a colleague of mine explained effectively, no longer exists in separate meeting rooms as SEO campaigns).

More elegant campaigns create inbound experiences for their users and attract them from search, social media, the blogosphere, shared content, and even traditional marketing methods. None of these may lead to immediate web conversions, but in nearly all cases, investment in these areas breeds a community of loyalty that, when the going gets tough, website owners can continue to go to well on over and over.

This, of course, requires an SEO to possess and incorporate a far deeper understanding of the types of targeted communities that a brand desires to connect to. User behavior, modern traffic metrics, authentic two-way dialogue between user and website owners (social, commenting, etc,) and even mundane (but important) traditional demographic information- all have a place.

It may be time to eschew what we view as the SEO’s role in traditional web revenue models. Sure, we’ll work to ensure that your website ranks competitively across search engines, but to say the work is done there would be unrealistic and traffic-based conversions would be unsustainable under the new sheriff in town at Google. Traffic, in of itself, is a human web behavior. Community building, brand engagement, targeted conversions, and earned return traffic? That’s divine.

By Daniel Hurley

This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on the Google ‘Panda’ Update’s impact on search marketing and how it has re-defined the industry.

The search industry was rocked in late February of 2011 with Google’s now-infamous Panda update to its ranking algorithm. Affecting a whopping 12% of queries, traffic drops were so drastic for some domains that many of those sites penalized were pushed to the brink of financial viability.  Many more businesses and their associated websites folded up entirely.

For those of us in the industry who understand the importance of diversified traffic referrals to a website, it’s hard to sympathize with those business models whose sole source of revenue is centered upon organic search referrals. At the same time, it did leave many questioning what we could learn from the toxic content and traffic that caused these sites to be affected.

Upon further examination of several affected sites, one of the main parallels we found were sites ranking for queries they had no business ranking for in the first place. Much of this begins at the query level and a deeper understanding of keywords, connective phrases, and the user’s thought process behind why they entered them into a search bar in the first place.

Learning from Queries

When you break it down, we’ve realized that there are a few different classifications that we can assign queries (a practice Google confirmed is ongoing en masse with user experience data collection).  Google has their own system, but for our purposes we’ve broken these queries down as Advanced and Intermediate.

If we back out the idea of search as information retrieval, and begin to look at queries as questions, you can reverse the cognitive process to understand the different types of questions that are being asked. This should provide us a baseline as to the best types of content to answer those “questions.”

Advanced Queries

Advanced terms are your “what is _______?” queries, of which there are sub-classifications. It is assumed that at least some of the search term elements within the query exist outside the general conversational vernacular. In most cases, content on landing pages for this type of query traffic should provide the best baseline overview of the query topic.

Intermediate Level Queries

Intermediate level queries consist of known terms and connective phrases. These too, can be broken-down further in a few different categories. All intermediate level terms can be appended by location.

Translating Search Intent into Quality User Experiences

Once we establish the types of queries a site is receiving traffic from, it’s important we ask ourselves two questions:

1.)  Does my site honestly deserve traffic for this search term?

2.)  If so, does my page accurately answer the query in such a way that creates a positive user experience?

Bounce rates, time-on-page, and common sense can answer question number one for you. If the answer is no, remove the content. Toxic traffic is a major signal to Google’s Panda system that the page is irrelevant, of poor quality, or not satisfactory with regards to the query- all of which translate to poor user experience.

As for question number two, first classify the types of terms that are garnering search traffic to your site then decide if you’re satisfying the query. Are you answering questions? Are your visitors arriving and leaving or migrating to different parts of your site? For general-level (advanced-investigative) terms, use this as an opportunity to drive them to the more qualified areas of your site. Allow entrance pages for these terms to dictate your information architecture. Don’t restrict interpretation of content as simply page copy; consider the use of bulleted lists, multimedia elements, or other data visualizations to satisfy queries.

Traffic, in and of itself, is not a means to an end. Furthermore, the content arms race is over. Relevant, qualified traffic translates to qualified and predictable user engagement with your site and its content.

If Panda has taught us one thing, it is that the role of the search engine optimizer has largely been redefined. The search spider’s experience and the user’s experience with your content are no longer mutually exclusive events, and by necessity, the SEO’s goals and the goals of the search engine are slowly marrying one another. True optimization from here forward means merging the traditional tenets of SEO with those centered on optimization of human experiences, understanding full well that the line between the two is vanishing.

In the beginning, search results returned information that appeared almost schizophrenic to the layman user. It had trouble deciphering language; didn’t always think logically, and on many occasions, returned queries that failed to meet user intent.

Like any technology, it had to evolve and react to forces around it to become better. Search companies like Google recognized that in order to fully comprehend what their users were searching for, they would have to pull data from throughout the web to gain insight into search behavior. The gap between early search engine ranking signals and search intent was significant enough that users were frequently dissatisfied with results. Likewise, content was manipulated to bring search results closer to the top for competitive terms, and quality suffered as a result.

As search has evolved and de-valued those signals that are too-easily gamed, it has brought users much closer to the unadulterated results they seek. Further, with the introduction of major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, search also cannot, and should not, function without some form of accountability to its users for signals and recommendations from across the social graph.

Today, these platforms serve as social therapy for the spammy, schizophrenic past where search has grown from, leading it in a user-specific direction and helping it deliver more relevant results to a particular person. The user relies upon the engine to deliver accurate information, while the engine relies upon the user’ social graph to continue to refine their listings. Their relationship is inevitably symbiotic, and companies should be wary of this. In other words, nobody should pursue one without the other, and here’s why:

Social Signals

Though major players have yet to fully commit to their weight on the record, social signals are becoming increasingly important in organic search. With a stranglehold on the social media market, Facebook plays a huge part in the way people interact on the web- as does Twitter. Shares, likes, mentions, tweets and re-tweets are all measurable via Social Plug-In Analytics in Google analytics. But more importantly, the newest member of the social media team, Google+, utilizes a clickable +1 button, which can demonstrate the popularity of one such item, whether it is a blog post, image or video. These items that you’ve “+1” or “liked” will certainly play a major role in search, whether you like it or not.

Recently, G+ was integrated directly into the search results, allowing users to refine their results within their own social graph. This means search engines can return results based on what a particular user has shown interest in addition to results that have been interacted with from around their social circle. And it doesn’t end there; if you’re signed in, you can also locate people within your circles.

Let’s say for instance that you’re looking for “John Smith.” In the pure results, you’ll return 79,000,000 results featuring information on Pocahontas’ boyfriend and other people named John Smith. On the other hand, assuming you know the person and you’re signed into a Google account, you’re more likely to find them using this feature. Google would love for you to think of them as universal search to your entire world considering that folks are increasingly storing their media, contacts and information on the web. While Google has yet to be extended a whole-hearted invitation to any third party social media data, G+ is slowly breaking market share into other social media platforms as a place for people.

Branding & Feedback

Social media pages are critical for brand engagement- something they make pretty simple. With a company or fan page, you can reach thousands of new and old customers, and distribute news about upcoming events, giveaways, and products. Likewise, you can interact directly with folks and answer questions that would normally be found in your website’s FAQ section – Like anybody wants to take the time to find or read that! This is real, living, breathing engagement, and engagement is one of the keys to successfully reaching a broader consumer base. Let’s face it; people want to know that you’re real and that you’re reaching out from a real and reliable source.

It’s all supplemental of course; just because you don’t have a FB or Twitter page doesn’t mean your website won’t rank well. But if you’ve already got the #1 spot, why not grab more managed-content search engine real estate for branded terms in the #2 position.

Authorship

Industry trends point to the fact that building traditional link profiles is slowly becoming less important, notably because of social signals. But in addition to their recent integration of Google+, Google has also supplied webmasters with the ability to channel authority through journalistic authorship. If implemented correctly, the rel=author tag allows people to view author information in natural SERPs. Essentially, this gives Google a little better understanding as to who did what and whether or not it can be trusted. For those familiar with Google feature rollout patterns, this should infer that authorship would play a role in how search results are positioned, specific to their trust and authority. Given that author profiles are linked directly to G+ accounts, this means that social media activity is directly affecting search.

So What Does it Mean for Me?

Thinking outside the web for a moment, information has always been passed through real life social interaction, and this information isn’t always something readily available.  For instance, if you’re curious about a social rumor, your local news site probably isn’t the best place to locate that information. However, your queries may be easily answered via your own social intraweb.

Likewise, social media continues to take pages out of the book of search. Our friendly (although frequently confounded) search spider fosters social media with the ability to properly implement pages and rank them in search.  In essence, both are taking care of each other.  And without this understanding, there’d be no relationship at all.  Yes, it’s somewhat of a primal approach, but it’s undoubtedly true. They both need each other, and every individual or company requires both.

Social media allows for 79,000,000 results for “John Smith” to be filtered through not only a particular user’s past experiences, likes, dislikes, and web interactions, but that of their entire social graph, as well. It is the heartbeat of human understanding that cannot be found in traditional search algorithms.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, traditional treatment for schizophrenia involves that of behavioral techniques and psychosocial therapies. More specifically, this includes social skills training – Ironic, right? Nevertheless, social media patches the divide between assessments inferred by a search spider and those inferred through human behavior. It has slowly closed gaps between loose associations and given users a way to exercise their decisions based on signals outside of traditional SEO.

Terakeet Chief Executive Officer MacLaren Cummings (left) and Terakeet Chief Technology Officer Patrick Danial (right) at their office in Syracuse.

Back in ancient times — before TV, that is — the phone company was the Internet, and the Yellow Pages functioned as Google. To get noticed, you bought a full-page ad or leap-frogged the competition alphabetically, by changing your name.

Thus was born a generation of companies titled “AAA” — arguably, the first search engine optimizers.

Today, Google guards its search engine algorithms the way KFC protects its 11 herbs and spices, and to get noticed on the Internet requires more than an “A” in your name. Also, the stakes — being listed not to a city but the world — were never greater.

And the job of influencing those Google searches could be the future of downtown Syracuse. Yes, you read correctly: This is an Internet story — not from Berkeley or Boston, but Syracuse. Downtown Syracuse.

There, an 11-year-old company, Terakeet Corp., has tripled its work force in three years, expanding its national footprint and crystallizing the urban renaissance fantasies that have been touted for decades by local political and business leaders.

In Armory Square, the company’s 33-year-old co-founder says the growth is just beginning.

“It may sound crazy,” chief executive officer MacLaren Cummings said recently. “But I think that we have the capability, if we make the right steps, to make this a billion dollar company in the next five to 10 years.”

Billion. Ten years. Crazy, or what?

Three years ago, the company had nine employees. Now, it has 32, estimated revenues in the tens of millions and an A-list of national clients, such as Coca-Cola Co., American Express Co., NBC Universal-Orlando and General Electric Co.

Plus, it has friends in high places. Really high places.

Four years ago, Cummings carved out a reputation as the search engine guru who helped transform Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign website into a fund-raising powerhouse. He signed on for a three-day stint. That lasted several months, working without compensation. After Clinton left the race, Cummings was snapped up by the Obama campaign, again footing his own bills.

He’s been called back to work for the president’s re-election, consulting in a campaign whose total cost could hit more than $1 billion.

Nevertheless, Cummings says his work for Obama won’t pay off in dollars, but in business contacts. Be they Republican or Democratic, captains of industry generally figure the guy who helps run a presidential campaign website knows what he’s doing.

“There is a certain prestige involved with being part of a political campaign, especially one that is regarded as highly technical,” said Cummings, a Tully native who attended Manlius-Pebble Hill High School and graduated from Cornell University in 2001. “There is a certain sizzle factor with potential customers. … The fact that a campaign of that magnitude would hire a firm like ours, I think, says something.”

On South Clinton Street, Terakeet quietly has expanded to take up two stories of the Neal and Hyde Building, which is mostly known for its ground floor, the Syracuse Suds Factory. But within the area business community, the company’s profile has soared.

“It’s part of the foundation for our future growth,” said Rob Simpson, president of the Center State Corp. for Economic Opportunity, a regional business organization. “You have a young entrepreneur who started here and is growing his business here. … They’re growing and expanding, doing everything right.”

Full Article at Syracuse.com

SYRACUSE, NY – The Post-Standard – Progress 2012

Original Video

In Armory Square, Terakeet Corp. has tripled its work force in three years, expanding its national footprint in the business of search engine optimization — or SEO — the art of raising clients’ profiles on Google Internet searches. The company, with 32 employees and a scattered army of free-lancers, boasts an A-list of national clients, such as Coca-Cola, American Express, NBC Universal-Orlando and General Electric. Also, it’s co-founder, 32-year-old MacLaren Cummings, made a name for himself in the 2008 presidential election, when he directed the fund-raising components of the websites for the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns. Video by David Lassman.

By Patrick Danial

An entire army of Roman slaves is murdered at the behest of a Roman general’s inability to identify his defector. This is the result of the climactic scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic classic, Spartacus. In a demonstration of conformity, hundreds of slaves rise and stand alongside Spartacus to protect him from crucifixion. Of course, grave misfortune quickly falls on all.

How does the Google Empire begin to determine ownership and trust as they attempt to weave a new social graph? Much like a hyperlink endorsement, the task at hand requires an ability to understand the new footprint an individual or brand leaves across the web. Today, our contributions to the digital medium bleed well beyond the white fences of our canonical homes. Syndication, social sharing, paraphrasing, and sourcing create added confusion for search spiders attempting to identify the author of any media asset, let alone the true reputation and authority of the referencing source. Too much ambiguity in ownership and you’re quickly swallowed in the vast sea of SERPs or, worse, penalized.

This is not to say you need focus on the purveyors of your hard work; much like a backlink profile there inevitably will be instances of automated scraping and spam—all of which is very natural and expected. Rather, its time we begin to explore the likely signals and referential elements that are within our control.

The Reputation and Collaboration Dilemma

Collaborative technology has allowed for the rapid growth of most large-scale knowledge platforms, such as Google Maps and Wikipedia. It is also what will, eventually, deliver us the semantic-web as Google, and others, attempt to catalog ‘an internet of things’ through various crowd-sourcing task services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.  But how are they to effectively establish ‘who’ is contributing and whether or not their value-add checks-out? Wikipedia is riddled with inaccuracies and grammatical gaffes, but lives in a much more controlled environment laden with editors in contrast to when you’re attempting to make sense of what people are saying and doing on websites you do not control.

Establishing reputation is, of course, a tricky art. For example, a research paper entitled “Reputation Systems for Open Collaboration”, the original WikiTrust algorithm of Wikipedia, was “…open to many attacks that allowed users to gain reputation while doing no useful work (or worse, while damaging the system).”. The self-creation of errors and omissions through a ‘dummy’ account, later to be corrected with an account in good standing, quickly inflates reputation scores. It was determined that reputation scoring be shifted to, rather, measure contribution quality by analyzing “standard edit distances between revisions” and “differentiate between word insertions and deletions”.

But how does this fit into the broader context of the web’s endlessly growing list of contributors? And how do we ensure our work is properly given credit and garnering positive quality scores?

Here are a few simple best practice authorship mechanisms to consider as you push your work out to the web:

The web is fickle and, unfortunately, still too easy to game. However, it’s not worth chasing nearsighted techniques inevitably landing you on Google’s short-list. Instead, by analyzing quality-control and value-scoring methods proven within limited, controlled, environments (e.g. Wikipedia, Google Maps), you can begin to anticipate where the broader indexing community will look for improvement. While striving for quality in what you publish is a given, don’t be shy in laying claim to your work; use everything available to help automated systems begin correlating who you are, who knows you, and what you’re talking about. From there, it’s about amplifying the discussion.

As for Kirk Douglas, his fate was likely still destined had he acknowledged himself that day among the slaves; perhaps then, though, he’d have saved a few more lives before martyrdom.

For nearly 75 years, Gym Source has built more gyms for more people than any other fitness equipment company in the world. As America’s largest commercial provider of fitness equipment, Gym Source serves a wide range of clients- from Fortune 500 companies to the Federal Reserve, Equinox to the Armed Forces. With over 300,000 clients in all 50 States and over 50 countries, Gym Source is the proven authority in fitness equipment.

Business Challenge:
Gym Source desired to expand their brand and physical retail locations into new markets. The company invested significantly in a new website to support these objectives. However, Gym Source was not in the position to create and implement expansion strategies because they needed to first increase their brand visibility online.

Terakeet Approach:
Terakeet saw a great opportunity to utilize their technology driven strategy to expand Gym Source’s online visibility. By leveraging proprietary in-house software, Terakeet was efficiently able to identify a large number of existing and new relationships to target with compelling outreach.

Results:
Gym Source saw huge improvements in their search engine presence and intelligent visibility of how their online efforts can accelerate expansion into new markets. Gym Source was able to achieve the number one organic ranking for ‘fitness equipment’ and increase the number of Google visits by almost 100%! Terakeet was able to broaden coverage by expanding the non-branded keyword combinations by 250%. As a result of this online presence and intelligent visibility, Gym Source has built an online community and supported their expansion into new markets.

Customer Testimonial

“We started working with Terakeet over 5 years ago when we were just beginning to market to our customers via the web. We were one of the first in our industry to do it and are now the nation’s largest retailer of gym equipment. Over the years Terakeet has become a partner and a friend; demonstrating flexibility on a number of occasions to accommodate our evolving strategies. We continue to rely on Terakeet for a myriad of technology needs.”

“While custom software is still a big part of our business, the website needed to speak more clearly to the work we’ve done in the web and SEO space,” said CEO Mac Cummings. “We’ve had the great fortune of working with some really unique clients over the years, from entrepreneurial companies much like ours, to mid-size and Fortune 500 companies, as well as recognizable political figures. We thought it was time to try to simplify our message as it relates to ‘who we are and what we do’, and hopefully in the process give visitors and potential clients a better idea of how we can help them.”

Terakeet is a company based on innovation and has created groundbreaking business solutions for today’s leading companies. At the core of Terakeet’s innovative solutions is an expertise in strategic web development, software development, and search engine optimization. Terakeet engineers apply the latest tools and technologies to improve workflow, create efficiencies, launch new products and services, and obtain greater market share for its clients, thereby enabling its clients to grow and profit.

For more information about Terakeet, please call (800) 655-2724, contact us, or send an email to info [a] terakeet.net.

The system is provided by Destiny USA, and the company hopes to offer it to many other new stores opening within the eight-story shopping complex as well. It incorporates two types of RFID technology: active ultra-wideband (UWB) tags and readers provided by Time Domain Corp., known as the Precision Location Ultra Wideband System (PLUS), and an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID system with Avery Dennison passive tags and Impinj interrogators. The Destiny USA Technology Platform ties these two systems together using a software platform provided by New York software firm Terakeet.

With its RFID deployment, Clothing for a Better Earth is also serving as a showcase for what the technology can do, and has invited other retailers to come take a look and consider how they could use RFID within their own space. The goal, says Pat Danial, Terakeet’s chief technology officer and co-founder, is to provide the system at numerous stores within the Carousel Center, part of a 1.3 million-square-foot mall complex under construction.

Clothing for a Better Earth, a new company that offers apparel made from natural, organic fibers, opened its first branch at a temporary 1,100-square-foot location in an open-air section of the mall, while a new area is being constructed, explains Frank Fiumano, the retailer’s general manager. The store opened last year on so-called Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving. With RFID, shoppers can track their own purchases, as well as learn about other products they might consider buying, and the store can gain data regarding shopper behavior, while also tracking its own inventory.

Full Article at RFID Journal

A 1,000-square-foot room with translucent flooring contains what appears to be a small clothing store with just two products — T-shirts and cloth handbags with the words “Surrender the past” printed on them. But what makes the “store” unique isn’t the see-through floor. It’s the technology behind the walls, under the shelves and attached to each T-shirt and handbag.

Through the use of a radio frequency identification system, the store can track what products a customer picks up, instantly send detailed information and customer reviews of those products to the shopper’s iPhone, and make suggestions, via nearby computer screens, of other products that might interest the customer.

The system even tracks customers as they walk through the store and displays on the computer screens items, in their size and preferred fabrics, that they might want to consider, based on their past shopping habits.

At the self-checkout desk, the customer just drops merchandise on the desk and an antenna built into the desk picks up a radio signal from a sticker attached to each of the items and rings them up. There are no UPC symbols to scan.

The customer swipes a credit card through a reader and the sale is complete.

Full Article at Syracuse.com